freitasm: I think SteveC needs to go around our Slingshot and Orcon forums...

What about Compass and Woosh? Those four ISPs make up the bottom four ISPs who are below 70% in Consumer's 2012 ranking.I can't find Consumer's results from previous years, but did find this press release from 2009:http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0912/S00598.htm

Only 57 percent of Vodafone broadband customers were satisfied with its overall performance, while 89 percent said they'd experienced slower-than-expected speeds. Vodafone also rated poorly for customer service and had above average problems for disconnections and drop-outs.Telecom received a 62 percent satisfaction rating this year, up significantly from its abysmal 42 percent rating in 2007. However, Telecom still rated poorly for customer service and had above average problems for disconnections, drop-outs, and slower-than-expected speeds.TelstraClear was the best of the big ISPs with 83 percent of its customers satisfied with its performance.

So, overall, Vodafone and Telecom have made very significant improvements, and TCL have dropped by a similar amount to Telecom's rise, in three years. (These three are 72%, 73%, and 74% this year.) That is great overall for the majority of customers!Interestingly, in the 2012 survey, TCL are perceived as above average for connection, and both VF and Telecom are perceived as below average for connection. ("... based on the percentage of broadband users who had not experienced disconnections or drop-outs ..."). This is consistent with the main point of my first post in this forum.Great to have a discussion, and all the best for the season! :-)

plambrechtsen: I can't count the number of folks who's DSL service has been significantly improved by them getting a Master Filter professionally installed.

Riding my bike into a new subdivision to visit a family member .. big billboard along the lines of "You are entering a Chorus fibre cabled area!" ... which left my host and I speculating on why, in a subdivision without analogue phone cable (apparently), data cabling within the new house was only analogue quality. Apparently the fibre goes into a distribution box in their garage, and low quality cable comes out.Old houses are an issue, but even most new ones still don't appear to be getting Cat 5 (never mind 5e or 6) yet! This is something Saturn / TCL have sidestepped by putting in their own coaxial cable, and I wonder how much of your personal speed over ADSL is due to your suburban and CPE cable quality.

Every time someone complains about random disconnections the first thing to check is wiring at home as this is most likely to cause problems. If there isn't a problem there (likely only if it's new wiring) the next stop is a Chorus problem as the network is not a Telecom property anymore.

Can only blame ISP really on a large nationwide/area outage but those and are uncommon occurrences

which left my host and I speculating on why, in a subdivision without analogue phone cable (apparently), data cabling within the new house was only analogue quality.

Because NZers don't truly value their comms as much as we should. You see American house ads that will say "Fibre ready" or "Ethernet ready" because they have figured out that it is actually beneficial to have a home network.

People building houses in BoF subdivisions were probably fairly ill advised on what they were actually going to get in terms of comms. The providers would have told them but the fact is the wiring is left up to the sparky working for the subdivision developer on stink rates. So why would the sparky even bother to communicate with the customer (or developer) to give the person buying the house the best experience. In saying that though from what I understand there was some fairly good guidelines from Telecom (or Chorus, or whoever it was) for people building in these areas to put a cabinet in the garage with star wiring to outlets.

TCL running coax everywhere is hardly any better than daisy chaining phone outlets aswell. There still needs to be an expensive piece of equipment on the end of that coax for the end user to use the service.So if you want to talk about house wiring in areas with high speed broadband then put some blame on TCL who have been in the position to tell customers building houses in Cable areas to wire their home with appropriate cabling for the last 10-15 years.

chevrolux:TCL running coax everywhere is hardly any better than daisy chaining phone outlets aswell. There still needs to be an expensive piece of equipment on the end of that coax for the end user to use the service.So if you want to talk about house wiring in areas with high speed broadband then put some blame on TCL who have been in the position to tell customers building houses in Cable areas to wire their home with appropriate cabling for the last 10-15 years.

TCL historically had no view on internal wiring - for a long time they wouldn't hook up anything to internal wiring, or infact any wiring installed by anybody else.

An HFC network opens up many areas of RF ingress that'll totally kill an entire node.

freitasm: Every time someone complains about random disconnections the first thing to check is wiring at home as this is most likely to cause problems ...

Yeah. I suspect that one of the things that biases the opinions in these forums is that those of us who contribute are often people who check their own connections before anything else. On reflection, I've probably 'fixed' cabling, DHCP, and router issues quite a few times without paying any attention. The aforementioned Consumer survey probably includes blaming the ISP for CPE failures. (That is why I used the word 'perceived' in my previous post quoting the survey.)

Last 'ISP' disruption I noticed (only one this year) was about midday one weekday. As ptinson pointed out above, at residential rates I didn't have a good reason to get upset. Instead I wondered down the street to see a Downers engineer, who promised to (and did) get it connected again in about 20 minutes!

sbiddle: ... for a long time they wouldn't hook up anything to internal wiring, or infact any wiring installed by anybody else.An HFC network opens up many areas of RF ingress that'll totally kill an entire node.

You mean like the way 'other people' used to illegally pick up the analogue TV signal from TCL's cable?I remember when the Saturn installer first put the cable in, it took quite an argument to get their horrible grey distribution box in an inconspicuous place on our freshly painted 1890s house! He put it up in the eves in the end, where it has happily sat, undisturbed, and undisturbing, for 12 or so years.When some very nice men (do cabling contractors employ any women?) came to put in another cable modem for Freeview this year, it took some persuading to get them to use existing RG6 rather than run their own out from the attic, down an outside wall ... etc.All works pretty well (I think .. only IP TV we have other had, so no reference to compare)! :-)

old3eyes: It's a good idea but can you expect Joe 6pack who just got their nice new ADSL modem in the mail to go and install one and rewire their house at the same time?? It won't happen..

But what I would like to see is when someone gets a new connection or Chorus gets sent to sort out a line issue customers (no matter which ISP they are with) are told they will most likely be up for a $200 charge to get a master filter installed and for the general public to accept and be happy about the fact they are going to get charged a fee to improve their broadband rather than complain about the fact "they are getting rorted for this extra charge they don't really need". It's much like being happy about getting water connected to your house, complaining it's only dribbling out the tap yet not wanting it to run at full pressure because they don't want to spend at maximum $200 to get it right.

Chorus provide all the tools to the ISPs to let ISPs run remote tests, gather line distance vs speed tests along with a whole myriad of detailed analysis on the line to see why customers are getting poor broadband with pretty graphs too. It's just a shame it's not leveraged anywhere near often enough.

I know it's not going to happen... But it would make a huge difference to so many peoples broadband experience if it did happen.

Again though, if the net is so so important you lose money when it is down why is there not a backup solution in place?! With 2degress doing 12GB for $99 for 6 months there is pretty much no excuse not too!

I wouldn't expect compensation for this. It wasn't even Telecom's fault in the first place. And people just need to roll with the punches some times I think.

Bingo, that is exactly what I do! I get the 12gig plan anyway (since they first started offering it!) all the time just because I go through so much on my smartphone :-)

My bad for not phrasing the previous post accurately enough. (however if next year I'd doing more video editing that requires heaps of uploading and downloading between people then 2degrees wouldn't be a sufficient solution)

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